Public Opinion Quarterly Advance Access originally published online on May 28, 2009
Public Opinion Quarterly 2009 73(2):255-280; doi:10.1093/poq/nfp020
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Impact of T-ACASI on Survey Measurements of Subjective Phenomena
Address correspondence to Charles F. Turner; e-mail: CFTurner{at}PopEpi.org.
Numerous studies have shown that audio-computer-assisted self-interviewing (audio-CASI) and telephone audio-CASI (T-ACASI) technologies yield increased reporting of sensitive and stigmatized objective phenomena such as sexual and drug use behaviors. Little attention has been given, however, to the impact of these technologies on the measurement of subjective phenomena (attitudes, opinions, feelings, etc.). This article reports results for the seven subjective measurements included in the National STD and Behavior Measurement Experiment (NSBME). NSBME drew probability samples of USA and Baltimore adults (Ns = 1,543 and 744, respectively) and randomized these respondents to be interviewed by T-ACASI or telephone interviewer-administered questioning (T-IAQ). Response distributions for all subjective measurements obtained by T-ACASI diverge from those obtained by human telephone interviewers. For six of our seven ordinal-scaled measurements, this divergence involved shifting responses directionally along the ordinal scale, as opposed to a nondirectional redistribution among response categories. When interviewed by T-ACASI, respondents were more supportive of traditional gender roles and corporal punishment, less supportive of integrated neighborhoods and same-gender sex, and more likely to agree that occasional marijuana use is harmless and to describe themselves as attractive. The majority of these results suggest that telephone survey respondents may provide more "tolerant" and "socially liberal" responses to human interviewers than to a T-ACASI computer. Similarly, although the evidence is not entirely consistent, the impact of T-ACASI appears to increase with the social vulnerability of the population surveyed.
THOMAS HARMON was a student in the MA program in Applied Social Research at Queens College of the City University of New York (VUNY). He is presently a Program Coordinator at the League Treatment Center, 885 Rogers Ave., Brooklyn, NY 11226, USA. CHARLES F. TURNER is a Professor of Applied Social Research at CUNY (Queens College and the Graduate Center) and senior consultant to the Program in Health and Behavior Measurement at Research Triangle Institute (RTI), 2816 Northampton St., NW, Washington DC 20015, USA. SUSAN M. ROGERS and ELIZABETH EGGLESTON are scientists with RTI's Program in Health and Behavior Measurement, 701 13th Street, NW, Washington DC 20005, USA. ANTHONY M. ROMAN is a Senior Fellow with the Center for Survey Research at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, 100 Morrissey Blvd, Boston, MA 02125, USA. MARIA A. VILLARROEL is currently a doctoral student in Epidemiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, 615 N. Wolfe Street, Baltimore, MD 21205, USA. JAMES R. CHROMY, LAXMINARAYANA GANAPATHI and SHEPING LI are with RTI, 3040 Cornwallis Road, RTP, NC 27709, USA. This article is based in part on an essay prepared by the first author for the M.A. degree in Applied Social Research at Queens College (CUNY). This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health [R01-MH56318 and R01-HD31067 to C. F. T.] The authors wish to thank Joseph A. Catania for collaboration in early phases of the design of this study and for access to the public use dataset from his 1996 National Survey of Sexual Health. The authors also wish to thank the many other people who made major contributions to this work during the proposal and design phase, most importantly, James Gribble.